by Tony Burgess
“But she did; she stopped. I think it was the first time in a long while that she had been treated like a person. She heard my little guiding melody, you see. And now, my boy, so will you. Stop talking like a bloody fool! Do you understand?”
TWELVE
Marion’s body, with its shallow flesh and brittle bones, is rallying its matter to save her. It’s not rallying, exactly, but dividing, experimenting.
While this division takes place Marion pulls the car to the side of the road. She feels the new arrangement, or rather the effects of it, and turns the rearview mirror down to see if she has changed. When she looks into her own eyes she asks two questions in succession.
“I wonder what I look like?”
And: “I wonder if he’s in there?”
The first sentence rises. That is, the cadence ascends so that the last word, “like,” is emitted in a breath that is clipped and held. The second sentence is the first breath released. It relaxes at the bottom, like a sack against the ground. Marion repeats the sentences. This time, however, she lifts the bottom to a midway point. “He’s in there” lifts away from her breath. With some effort it is suspended, so that when she repeats it, again, she has to re-establish where her starting point is. Each time she repeats the words the lift is easier, more natural. The words themselves start to prefer this.
“I wonder what I look like. I wonder if he’s in there.”
Marion pulls her car slowly from the curb and readjusts the rearview mirror. She spots the Mayor walking toward the back of the car and accelerates. She turns left on Hillicote and drives past the small white exteriors of the shops. The road descends toward the lake and she pulls around on the small spit and parks with the car facing back towards town. For a moment she sees her husband in profile. His open mouth is the “V” cut into her lapel. His moustache droops, and lifts like her second sentence. She turns him, in her mind, so that he faces her. The second half of his moustache is graded downward by her first sentence; this deforms his mouth. Marion smiles and says into her rearview mirror: “I wonder what I look like. I wonder if he’s in there.”
She starts her car again and as she passes the first cottage, a small brown brick structure back in the trees, she lowers her window and says, quietly, “I.” The second house is also partially obscured and to it she says: “wonder.” A man is raveling a hose at the side of this house. A stone bird bath, clean and wet, tilts slightly on the lawn beside the driveway. The third house is a thin narrow shack surrounded by scruffy brown thistle trees and thorny shrubs with hard orange berries. Marion flips her hand through the window and says, louder: “what.” The fourth word is spoken to an empty lot with a tangle of rusted metal beams and bars rising out of untended grass. Marion laughs and points at the structures, which may or may not be discarded swing sets, and says, “I.” She has driven up onto the main section of Hillicote now and the stores are tightly crammed together. Caesarea Variety: “look.” Post office: “like.”
At the intersection there’s four teenagers who cross against the lights on rollerblades: “like, like, like, like.” Real estate office: “I.” Bletcher’s Video: “wonder.” IGA: “if.” The road bends up a hill and around behind the stores to cottages that overlook the bay. Marion pulls the car onto a gravel lookout that’s held back from a steep drop by white posts joined along a painted chain.
She turns the car to face back down, to repeat her short trip through town. In the bay, at the water’s edge, obscured from her view, tiny white waves break on stones as sharp white teeth bite and swallow tan pebbles in small, ferocious chomps. She is unaware, as she swoops across the town she lives in, of the joyful chiasmus her car is travelling. Its mischief carries her back and forth in limitless variation. She has made a fiend out of the figure of her escape, and along the line where the lake might tear away from the land her home town is being devoured.
THIRTEEN
Kathy and Jack collect awnings. Awnings decorated with watermelon slices, with saluting servicemen. Coke and Sprite awnings. They have nine all together, stolen from cottages and trailers, collapsed and stacked in a space beside their tiny fridge. Kathy is crouched beside the colourful cloth and Jack is laying on the small bed with his hands interlocked behind his head.
“Don’t bug me.”
He stares at the ceiling and makes a hurt face, bouncing his foot across his knee. Kathy rocks on her haunches, then springs from behind the awnings. She pushes the palms of her hands against her cheeks and wiggles her fingers across her eyes.
“Check it out.”
Jack looks down at her without raising his head from the bed.
“Please Kathy, I’m thinkin’.”
Kathy rises on bent knees, goes behind the kitchen counter.
“I know, I’m Catwoman. I can smell the wood burning.”
Jack rolls to his side and points down his leg to where she hides.
“That’s the problem right there. Right there.”
“What?”
“If you were Ms. Whiskers you wouldn’t depend so much on structure like that.”
Kathy rises slightly, still bent at the knees, and lays her arms across the counter.
“I am not dependent on structure.”
“You’re like some little smallmouth. Totally dependent on structure to hide you, feed you, everything. The Whisker fish is not like that.”
Kathy moves, still on her haunches, to the small linoleum floor between the fridge and the counter. She returns her hands to her face, but this time her fingers jut and form a shelf that points from under her nose.
“Awright, Mr. Ass Fish, no structure. See? No problem.”
“That’s it. Mr. Whiskers carries structure around with him. In here.”
Jack taps the side of his nose.
“Close your eyes. Remember what everything looks like? Now, convert that into smell. Everything. Make it up. Shapes have smell, distances have smell.”
“Ugh. The bottom of the fridge smells about two inches away.”
“Yeah, well there’s another thing. This is the hard part. I don’t know how to put this, but, Mr. Whiskers smells everything with style. You gotta smell with style. Ya need the style to get that S groove goin’ down at the bottom of the river.”
Kathy snakes around at the end of the bed, bobbing and diving, as if her upper body is floating.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Ya see, the S makes sense because it’s where the structure inside meets the structure outside. Down the river. But not just because it makes sense, that’s not the real reason for the S. No. No, the real reason Ms. Whiskers is snakin’ her hips back and forth is because it feels very, very nice.”
Kathy undoes the top button of her jeans and leans forward at the hips.
“That catfish makes everything her own, a million years of river movin’, the folds hidden so long ago, so perfectly, inside her.”
Kathy pulls the top of her jeans down so that the smooth flesh of her hips is visible. She has to feel for herself, and she lays her palms flat against the skin. Then she scoops her fingers under the back of her jeans, and exposes her ass to the far wall.
“And she is so sure, has such style, that she can hang these ugly ropes out of the corners of her mouth — long, slimy ropes. And when she drops her bottom jaw, getting close to the tight end of the S, those whiskers are a long, black, liquid, jewel.”
Kathy reaches up onto the bed and pulls down Jack’s zipper, sending his cock springing straight up.
★
Jack has had an obsession with animal biology for nearly twelve years. When he was nineteen his parents, who had hated him perfectly, and never tired of pointing out his worthlessness, slapped his face just to show him how they felt. They laid the classifieds in front of him at the breakfast table. Flanking him, they dangled their fists over his shoulders and told him that his future was in the classified section
of the day’s paper. And if he didn’t find it, they said, they’d drive him to Yonge Street tomorrow and throw him out of their moving car.
Terrified and sorry that he had ever been born, Jack scoured the paper closely. The jobs listed grisly descriptions of indentured servitude: the night shift at McDonald’s, telemarketer, door-to-door solicitation, telemarketer, order picker at Consumers Distributing. Worse even, with wages that emphasized the minimum of minimum wage, the jobs all required experience. Jack noticed the shadows of his parents’ hands, preparing to strike, and then he saw it: Laboratory technician. In a facility near Alliston. Signature Specimens. No experience required. A dollar above the minimum. Jack pointed to the heavy ink icon of a well-groomed cat and dog, back-to-back, at the top left corner of the listing. He looked up just in time to see the flat hands of his mother and father raining down on him like angry sticks. He knew, as slaps stung across his eyes and throat, that they were, of course, going to smack him anyway — no matter what had happened.
The man who interviewed Jack, and who would become his boss, was named Powel Rath. The first thing that Jack noticed about him was that he appeared to be very ill. His hair wasn’t graying. Instead, a cottony white sud broke up through the grease-laden black carapace. His face was long and thin, with loose bags running off its hollow features. At the corners of his lipless mouth lay a jumble of polypy skin; his forehead was a bone pushing against a transparency that became greenish-grey at his temples. His eyes were striking: they had burrowed up so far beneath his spidery brows that they looked out no further than their lids — in fact, they wobbled slightly, angled down so that they appeared to constantly count the few eyelashes that remained. He was a haunted castle of a man. And Jack had to adjust to a boss who would never look directly at him. The interview itself was simple enough: no questions. In fact, as he listlessly slurred through a series of memorized statements, it seemed that Rath was giving Jack the job simply because he showed up.
“This is a good job. Fact is, most kids who graduate from university are lookin’ for these jobs. But they’re also looking for a wage that can help them with those godawful loans. We train our people well, they get the job done, so why should we look after debts to the government? Lose money? Their problem. Anyway, there’s the thinking. Before I go much further, we should take care of this …”
Rath twirled a piece of paper with long orange fingers, and tapped an empty line at the bottom.
“This is a form all our employees sign. No big deal. Standard. It just says that you will never discuss what goes on here with anybody. This is intellectual property you’re gonna be working with, and we protect it.”
Jack read a part of the third paragraph and signed.
“OK, let’s take you for a tour.”
Rath lead Jack down a corridor and they passed people in mucky lab coats that were oddly splattered in bright colours — colours that would come to mean so much to Jack in the future: Yellow, blue, red.
“This is your station in here.”
Rath swung open a panelled aluminum door. Inside were long stainless steel benches. They bevelled down from a cinder block wall to troughs at their edge.
“This is the cat room. I’ll have somebody show you exactly what you do here. You get about eighty fresh cats in the morning, you strap ’em up on these.”
Behind the door was a bin, full of small wooden crucifixes streaked with blood.
“And then, well, they’ll tell ya. Ya have to hook ’em up to the glycol and formaldehyde, fill ’em and then dye a couple of systems: arterial, intestinal. Clip the nails, then fill up the trolley, here, when they’re done.”
The room is spotless, though a thick, white vapour hangs in the air. Apart from a glistening clump of what might be cat claws near a drain on the floor. Jack can see no sign of the mayhem Rath is describing.
“Yeah, I’ll get Liz to show you exactly how to go about all that in the morning — she’s over doin’ fetal pigs right now. Room twelve, left, down the hall. Drop in and say hi before ya go.”
Liz is seated at a vast metal table in room twelve. On the table are hundreds of pink pouches, each about the size of a hamburger. When Jack looks closer he can see tiny red limbs, tipped by the unformed nibs of toes and fingers. Their heads, definitely pig-like, are watery and delicate and held just out of focus by translucent membranes. From their bellies run eight-inch tubes of flesh. Liz pulls one by the leg and slides the bluish tube between her gloved fingers. She expertly puckers open the tube and, while pinning a vein that hangs on the table with her thumb, slips and clamps a large-gauge needle into the umbilical cord. She reaches under the table to where the thin hose that comes from the needle falls into her lap, and she flips a small metal handle. The little pig’s legs instantly rise, and it rolls onto its back. Liz wipes her gloved hand on the grimy sleeve of her lab coat and extends it to Jack.
“Hi. I’m Liz. I guess barf bag told you to come see me.”
Liz leans back and brings a finger to her bottom lip. The thin human-like skin of her glove has snapped open at her knuckle and hangs like a deflated blister. She is considering what to say to Jack — what to say first.
“Did ya notice his eyes?”
“Uh, yeah. Why? Is there something wrong with them?”
“See that tall cylinder over there in the corner?”
“Yeah.”
“That thing is full of ethylene glycol and formaldehyde. The formaldehyde’s not a problem, but the ethylene glycol is so corrosive that if you get a drop on ya, even a tiny drop on your shoe, you have to hit that buzzer then strip down and we come running with hoses. And you see that funnel shape at the very top? That’s where you fill it. You have one, too, in your room. It’s tall. You gotta get up on your toes and then ya gotta jump that extra inch to up end the canister and drop it in. You can do it; it’s safe. Well, not safe, not by a long shot. Just stay focused and don’t be a loser and you’ll get it in every time. Thing is, it throws a mist of that shit all over the place. And you know what that does to ya?”
“No.”
“It erodes your mucous membranes. That’s what’s wrong with Rath. His eyes are dissolving. Total tunnel vision. Like lookin’ at fuzz down a six-foot pipe. He’s been here for, like, fifteen years. So it’s a pretty slow process. Unless you’re planning to make this a lifelong career — no problem. I’ve been here for two years and there’s nothing wrong with me. I get regular check-ups and everything since I got pregnant. It’s OK. I’m gonna leave here soon. Before the health of the baby is affected. Hey, ya wanna see something cool?”
“Sure.”
“Barf bag says we shouldn’t show anybody this ’til they been workin’ here a while, but what the hell.”
Liz leads Jack, who is dizzy from breathing as shallow as he can, down the far end of the hall to a huge, silver, airlocked door. Stacked and tossed inside are the heads of horses; the bent bodies of baby whales; the upper torso of an ape; toad bodies tangled in a heap of dog’s heads; slabs of thick fatty tissue; and stacks of crates filled with grey, deflated organs. Liz puts her hand on the snout of an upright horse’s head and slides it from the base with the side of her foot. Behind the horse head is a fat glass jar, about two feet tall. Liz lays her hand, upward, on its white screw-top lid.
“Ta-da. The Tadpole.”
In the jar is a human fetus, fairly evolved, maybe even close to nine months. It is perfectly preserved and relaxed, floating in fluid.
“Not legal. Not at all legal. In fact, I don’t even know where they got it from. I’ve heard that it’s barf bag’s daughter, but I don’t know. Cool, though, eh? So there ya are. Did you sign that form?”
“Ya.”
“Well, then you can’t say nothin’ about any of this, right?”
“Oh I won’t.”
“OK. Cool. I’ll see ya tomorrow morning and we’ll plump up some cats?”
&nb
sp; “OK.”
“Oh shit! That reminds me! Oh no! My pigs!”
Liz dashes out of the storage room, knocking the horse head over against Jack’s thigh. Jack tips it back up on its ears and follows her out.
Disaster has struck the pig room. As they swing open the door a tiny pig heart hits Jack square in the forehead. He closes his eyes, terrified that the fluid on his cheek is the deadly ethylene glycol. He can hear the taut popping sound of the pigs’ strong, sac-like bodies bursting on the table.
Suddenly he feels the thud of water being drilled into the back of his head. The force knocks him unconscious and he falls to the floor.
That was his first day. That night his parents interrogated him, this time with their fists dangerously closed. He figured it was better, at least, to start working at the lab, than to have his parents dump his bruised body in an alley downtown.
In the morning there are three garbage cans in the middle of the concrete floor in his work space. He lifts a lid on dozens of motionless cats, their eyes closed and their clean bodies curled through and around each other.
“OK, Doc, let’s get started.”
Liz stuffs a pair of gloves into the crook of Jack’s arm and wheels a cat body out of a can and flips it heavily onto the bevelled table.
“Now, grab me one of them racks by the door and I’ll show ya.”
Liz lays the body out on its back against the wooden frame and extends its upper legs along the crossbeams, snapping them into place with elastic bands. She pulls out a pair of scissors from a ledge beneath the table and snips through a collar. Before tossing it she turns over the silver diamond-shaped tag.
“Your first patient is ‘Jell-O.’ Hmmm, Jell-O the cat. OK.”